Saturday, August 7, 2010

Amazon Cloud Revenue Could Exceed $500 Million In 2010

The Kindle e-reader may not be Amazon (NSDQ:AMZN)'s only cash cow.

Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing division of the Web retail company, is becoming a more important -- and more lucrative -- revenue driver for Amazon as more companies move their business-critical applications to the cloud.

So far, however, determining how much revenue Amazon has driven with AWS, which comprises Amazon's 12 cloud computing offerings like Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform, Simple Storage Service (S3) offering and others, has been a challenge. Amazon doesn't break AWS revenue out when it reports its quarterly earnings and instead lumps it into the "other" revenue category. Amazon has only subtly noted that its AWS sales are growing.

"We're seeing rapid growth in Kindle, Amazon Web Services, third-party sales, and retail," Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO said in the company's second quarter earnings statement, offering only a glimpse into the cloud offerings' sales.

But a recent report by UBS Investment Research shines a little more light on just how much of money AWS is bringing in for Amazon.

In a report, UBS analysts Brian Pitz and Brian Fitzgerald predict that AWS revenue will hit $500 million in 2010. In 2011 AWS revenue will hit about $750 million, the analysts predict. And come 2014 AWS could capture roughly $2.5 billion in revenue.